Turkiye and Greece - April 2026

Travel Blog - Turkiye - Greece - 2026

April 18, 2026

Gigi and Bearpaw have headed out on yet another new adventure.  This trip will take us to two more countries and will also let Gigi check off another continent.  The countries are Turkiye (that’s the new spelling) and Greece.  Gigi will also get to check another continent off her list.  That would be Asia as part of Turkiye is in Asia and part of it is in Europe.

Our day started early Saturday morning with a trip to the Airport to begin our first leg of our journey.  When we arrived we were told that our flight was running about 90 minutes late.  This would be a challenge as our layover in Dallas was only about two hours.  That would give us less than thirty minutes to deplane, figure out at which terminal our connecting flight happened to be, and then travel around the Dallas airport to get to the gate.

As it turned out, an earlier flight to Dallas was also going to be late.  A number of people on that plane then cancelled their flight and booked on another flight so as not to miss their original connection.  This then would create some empty seats on the earlier flight.  Since we were at the airport already we simply asked to change flights.

Now comes the weird part.  The earlier (also late)  flight boarded and left KC about the same time as our original flight.  We left the terminal and sat just off the runway for about fifteen minutes.  When we arrived in Dallas we sat just off the terminal for fifteen to twenty minutes.  We arrived at the gate within a few minutes of our original arrival time.

But wait.  There’s more.  Our original flight, even though it left late, arrived within a few minutes of when we arrived.  We could have stayed with the original flight, which had better seating, and still arrived in time to make our next flight.

The next leg of our journey was a flight from Dallas to London.  This was a nine hour flight.  Other than it being long it was pretty uneventful.  We did get to see the sun rise on our approach into the London airport.

Our final flight of the day took us from London to Istanbul.  We met with the cruise personnel who shuttled us to the Four Seasons Hotel in Istanbul.  We both had to take a shower to get the travel funk off of us.

The final act of the day was to find the local McDonald’s. They had pretty much the same menu except they did offer muffins, red velvet cake, chocolate cake, cheese cake, and churros.  We tried the churros.  Not bad for fast food.  They also had a cat that seemed to be perfectly at home.

We begin more of our tours of Istanbul in the morning.  Since neither of us has gotten more than an hour’s sleep since leaving home we are going to call it a day.

Tomorrow will be another adventure.